“Well first off,” said Mark Green, the administrator of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), “You will not hear me use the term ‘public-private partnership.’ I despise the term because it’s, in my opinion, devoid of meaning. [P]ublic-private partnerships, which USAID and others have done for a long time, are largely about contractual grants, contracting [sic].”

Green, the former Congressman from Wisconsin and former US Ambassador to Tanzania, was speaking that day on USAID’s newly released Private Sector Engagement Policy. The policy, Green suggested, had come about because “the relationship between American business and the developing world has fundamentally changed in recent years.”

In front of a room full of suits seated at white tabletops, Green explained how the new policy instructed USAID to “turn to the private sector, private enterprise, for … development solutions”:

So, as an example, we’re partnering with MasterCard in refugee settings in Africa, Uganda, and Kenya, to provide a microgrid electrical power and to provide some internet connectivity. So our goal is to help displaced families sort of connect with the outside world so that, God-willing, one day, the fence comes down, or the gates open; they’re connected to the world around them.

Green offered another example; a memorandum of understanding USAID had just signed with Corteva Agriscience, which is the agricultural arm of Dow-DuPont, characterized by Green as an “American agribusiness giant.” Yet Green offered few details about the agreement, with the exception that Corteva planned to market seeds and storage facilities in Kenya and Uganda.

What could a modestly-funded development agency offer one of the largest agribusiness firms in the world? According to Green, USAID saw itself increasingly working as an intermediary between US-based multinationals and African governments. It’s easier, Green said, for USAID to ask for foreign countries to change policy than for the private sector to do so, an area USAID was happy to assist in:

What we do [sic] for them is we did de-risk some of the investments. What we get from our side is those farmers get access to the technology that our farmers have had for a long time. Corteva will make a buck; we actually think that’s a good thing that they make a dollar from this process.